Yossarian

Hi everyone,

It has been brilliant to follow the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning developments at companies like Google DeepMind, Facebook, and others. At Yossarian we are exploring what these technologies can do for human creativity. We're building an AI for creativity. Today, we are thrilled to be announcing Yossarian Creative Services. After a year of iteration, testing and building with users; we have now created some very special in-house tools to better support the creative practices of the branding, strategy, research and innovation teams within your organisation. Yossarian Creative Services is simple. Just send us your project brief, tell us what you are looking for and we apply our unique tool set to help reach better creative outcomes for your teams and clients. Yossarian Creative Services can provide:

War Room in a Box - The box includes: printed Strategic Concept Maps, Detailed Lateral Association Maps, inspiration imagery collection, and "How might we..." prompts.

Brainstorming & Workshops - Our brainstorming and workshop guides will lay out the content and methods to move your team’s thinking into new conceptual territory. Facilitation also available.

Mood Boards - Tell us what concepts you are interested in exploring and we'll return a collection of images that expand upon the idea and also offer possible lateral associations.

Strategic Insight User Research Reports - We are able to collate user data to give you a detailed analysis of the lateral concepts that you wish to explore further, potentially uncovering hidden ideas.

Custom Tools - With our customised support services you can build and search tailored data sets as well as concept social listening, concept map maintenance and ongoing insight generation. We can work with you to explore the application of Yossarian AI for your brand or organisation’s specific needs.

These bespoke services allow you to use the power of the Yossarian Creative AI to support your creative briefs or projects. Use Yossarian like another clever freelancer on your team. It is as simple as sending in the brief and getting back creative insights that can really push your business forward. A big thank you for all your support! Yossarian has come a long way, and your ideas and feedback have helped turn the panda into something really special. 

Thanks again, and as always you can play with the free version at Yossarian.co! 

Do you have a routine that keeps you on your creative toes all day? This infographic produced by Info We Trust, based on the book Daily Rituals, shows how creatives throughout history have used their 24 hours differently. Some took long walks, some worked better late at night, while others found that naps were essential to their productivity. 

Have you ever wondered when we started to refer to cleverness as if it were light (using terms such as ‘brilliant’ and ‘bright’ as opposed to ‘dim’)? Have ideas always been discussed as if they were children (with imaginations being ‘fertile’, being able to ‘birth’, ‘father’, and ‘conceive’ of ideas)? A research project on metaphor mapping taking place at the University of Glasgow is looking to uncover these very evolutions of thought. We spoke with Dr Ellen Bramwell about the project and its implications for how we understand metaphor.

For the past three years the team in Glasgow has been working on the Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project, culminating in the launch of the freely-accessible Metaphor Map of English. The Metaphor Map shows metaphorical links between different areas of meaning from the Anglo-Saxon period to the present day. The tool lets us explore how metaphorical ways of thinking and expressing ourselves have changed over more than a millennium, and will provide a key to answering questions such as how do metaphors arise, which domains of experience are most prominent in metaphorical expressions, and how have metaphors developed over the centuries in response to social change.

Launched in July 2015 to a positive reception, the Map has proved to have a broader appeal than the team ever imagined, explained Ellen: “The Metaphor Map was originally envisioned as a tool for researchers in the history of English and for those interested in how language changes and how people mentally structure their world. However, we have had a real explosion of interest amongst the wider public since we launched the Map – it seems that these are issues which strike a chord beyond universities.”

The sheer scale of the project is staggering. This is the first time that an entire language has been analysed in this way, simply because an equivalent to the Historical Thesaurus of English, on which the research is based, doesn’t exist for any other language. “We have ended up with around 14,000 metaphorical connections between categories and many, many more thousands of words giving evidence for these connections.”  The research means that we can see which connections are long-standing and those which are relatively new. “We can trace metaphorical connections back through time to when their first written evidence emerged. Many metaphors go right back to the Old English spoken by the Anglo-Saxons before 1150AD, for example describing being emotionless in terms of solidity (as in the word ‘hard’) or mental understanding in terms of vision (as in to ‘see’).”

Metaphors are being invented all the time by writers to express ideas in a novel way, yet they also frequently emerge and become everyday expressions in popular culture. For example the use of the word ‘virus’ when applied to the domain of computers helps people understand something new in terms of something they already understand. “There are tens of thousands of metaphorical expression in English, at the very least. Researchers have argued that somewhere between 8% and 18%* of English communication is metaphorical,” said Ellen, “so it’s very widespread.”

Ellen reports that concepts from the physical world are particularly common in metaphors, especially when used to describe something abstract and intangible. We make sense of the world with metaphors, whether we’re talking about ‘a healthy economy’ or ‘a clear argument’, and often, without realising, we may be saying something about the society we live in. “The really interesting thing is that different languages do not necessarily use the same metaphorical connections, which suggests that those speakers might possibly be thinking about the same concepts in a different way,” said Ellen.

The team’s AHRC-funded educational project, Metaphor in the Curriculum, is currently working with secondary school teachers to produce a range of free online educational resources based around the Metaphor Map, available in spring next year, along with an app which uses the Metaphor Map. The hope is that the Map will help students understand metaphor on a deeper level. “One thing we found while talking to school teachers was that some pupils really struggle with understanding and identifying metaphor in literature, let alone in more ‘everyday’ texts such as newspapers. I think it is important to learn about metaphor if you want to understand language, especially in terms of how it might relate to thought and to how words change their meaning,” said Ellen.

Online tools such as the Metaphor Map and Yossarian provide ways for students to engage with metaphors and open themselves up to more creative modes of expression. When a user searches on Yossarian, they are encouraged to think about the metaphorical connections between their search term and their image results. Our users have reported that practicing this kind of lateral thinking helps to improve their creativity. Ellen agrees that thinking metaphorically is an inherently creative process: “Regardless of the connection you are making, it involves mentally bringing together two entirely separate concepts. Mapping the attributes of one thing onto another requires a leap of imagination, especially if you are making a connection for the first time. What we have done in creating the Metaphor Map is to provide an immense picture of these leaps of imagination throughout the history of the English language.”

Head over to the Metaphor Map to start exploring for yourself, and be sure to take a look at the user guides and the short video guides which provide a great introduction to the tool. Many thanks to Dr Ellen Bramwell, for taking the time to explain the research and answer our questions.

Creativity in business is increasingly seen as a necessity when it comes to achieving success. However, it can be difficult for business leaders to foster creative thinking among their employees as they have to take a step back and learn to give people enough freedom to be truly creative.

Back in May 2014, Adobe wanted to see exactly how creativity influences business results. They commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey senior managers from over 300 large global companies in order find out how creativity affects various markers of success for a business.

Their keys findings provide compelling evidence for why business leaders should take creativity seriously:

Companies that foster creativity achieve better revenue growth than less their creative peers.

Creative companies are more likely to enjoy a market leadership position than their competitors.

Despite the perceived benefits of creativity, 61% of companies do not see themselves as creative.

69% of creative firms reported winning awards for being a “best place to work.”

Tools like Yossarian are one way that businesses can encourage creativity among employees. By stimulating out-of-the-box thinking and getting users to think about a topic in metaphorical terms, Yossarian helps people to make connections that they might not have otherwise made. It expands creative ability, even among people who identify themselves as being non-creative. Given the results above, incorporating a tool like Yossarian into your daily work practice can only be good for business.

“For years, business leaders have focused on things like employee productivity, process efficiency and workforce planning as the key success drivers for their companies. But over the past few years, the mindset has shifted. Leading companies recognise the importance of another key success driver – the need to infuse creativity into all aspects of the business environment – from strategy and culture, to innovation and customer engagement,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media at Adobe. “And creative companies are 50 percent more likely to report a commanding market leadership position over competitors.”

We’re fascinated to see what the future holds for creativity and technology in the workplace. With several large firms, including advertising agency Initiative, already encouraging employees to use Yossarian for idea generation, we’re feel the future for augmented creativity in business is bright.

Whether you’re a researcher presenting your latest findings, or a school teacher explaining a complicated idea to your class, making sure that your audience understands what you’re trying to express can be difficult. Dr Emily Grossman, an expert in molecular biology, and a broadcaster and educator who trains contestants for the FameLab International science communication competition, gives some advice on how to do it.

One of Dr Grossman’s tips is to use metaphors and imagery to help convey a complex idea. “They say that a picture paints a thousand words, and that’s equally true for the images we create through words. If you can get an audience to really 'see' what you’re trying to explain, they will not only be able to understand it better, but they will also remember it,” says Dr Grossman.

A tool like Yossarian can provide a quick and easy way to come up with effective metaphors to make your classroom teaching and business presentations more engaging and impactful. “Analogies and metaphors work really well, especially if there are no real-life examples to draw on. You do have to make sure that your chosen comparison really works, but a good metaphor for a complex topic will stay in people’s minds forever. For example, I use a horse-racing analogy to explain electricity to my students. The horses are the electrons, and the race track is the electrical circuit.”

At Yossarian we believe that creativity is about making new connections. It’s about getting away from the obvious and pushing yourself to think about things with a fresh perspective. We loved reading recently how Maurice Lévy, CEO & Chairman of Publicis, describes creativity in the introduction to the latest issue of The Drum:

“The idea is that creativity is very simply the newest imaginable idea […] This is precisely the mind-set that opens you up to the world, with curiosity, intelligence and sensitivity. This is about gaining a new perspective, seeing through a new prism, thus looking at the product, the brand or the consumer differently. Out of this discrepancy, a freshness arises that will once again give birth to beautiful stories that will change the brand’s tale.”

At Yossarian we’ve been thinking about situations where our creative search engine could be useful and one context we’re particularly excited about is in the classroom. Whether to develop creativity and critical thinking skills, to help students understand metaphors, or for teachers to construct metaphors to help explain ideas to students, we feel that there’s huge scope for Yossarian in education. We spoke with Jered Borup, assistant professor in the Division of Learning Technologies at George Mason University, about ways that teachers might use Yossarian and the potential of technology for learning.

Technology and learning

Jered explained that we can think about learning in terms of the three Es: efficiency, engagement, and effectiveness (a model established by Professor David Merrill), and that technology can improve each of these areas in different ways. Technology can make learning more efficient by cutting the time and cost of teaching, it can foster more of a hands-on approach for more engaged learning, and it can make learning more effective as it enables a teacher to do things they couldn’t otherwise. “I think that’s the powerful one. By using technology in certain ways you are able to change the pedagogy in the classroom so that your teaching is more effective,” says Jered.

Jered’s research into technology integration in education has shown him that certain technology can make learning more participatory. “With learning theory there’s one philosophy that if you organise the content in a certain way, the student will absorb it, like a bucket being filled with water. The other approach is that you’re really trying to light a fire. You’re trying to give students control over their learning and give them a choice, allowing them to construct their understanding rather than just absorb it. I feel that technology can enable that, and foster different types of collaboration and communication.”

Yossarian - part of a teacher’s toolkit

Can creativity be taught? If so, can tools like Yossarian prove useful in the classroom? According to Jered, right now there’s a big drive in education to get students to use critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity (collectively known as the “4 Cs”). This framework is advocated by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and is believed to be necessary for student success in the new global economy. Jered suggests that Yossarian could be a fun way for teachers to implement this framework in the classroom, getting students to brainstorm about a topic and make connections between two laterally associated ideas, thus working both their creativity and critical thinking muscles. In addition to general brainstorming, Yossarian is an ideal tool for teaching about metaphors, allowing students to create their own metaphors in a visually engaging way.

Another way that Yossarian could be useful for teachers is as a tool to aid communication with students. By using Yossarian to find metaphors that students are already familiar with, material can be made more absorbable. As a researcher, when Jered needs to interpret his data and create frameworks to communicate his findings, he’ll often open up Yossarian and search for keywords. Recently, when searching for ‘learning’, he found various images that struck him as insightful. “One result was a parachute which made me think about learning and safety, one had lots of people in it so it implied that learning is collaborative, and a really interesting one was an image of medicine. I hadn’t considered that before but it seems to fit.” By using metaphors we can explain complex ideas in a way that’s more digestible and memorable.

Technology does not replace pedagogy

While technology in the classroom can be beneficial if used effectively, according to Jered it’s clear that quality pedagogy is what really matters when it comes to increasing engagement and enhancing learning. “I’ve found that it’s not only about the technology but what’s important is the pedagogy and the student-teacher relationships. I think technology can amplify whatever a teacher wants to do. So if they just want to lecture and have very little student participation, technology can enable that - we’ve all experienced that with powerpoint presentations. But if a teacher believes in an approach where learners construct their own knowledge and are more active, then technology can amplify that,” says Jered. When a certain technology is seen as the saviour of education, without the backup of a pedagogy that students need, it largely fails, explains Jered. He views the Mooc (massive online open course) movement as unsuccessful for this very reason. “It was thought that as long as students have access to the content then that’s all they need. However the material, typically videos and quizzes, didn’t provide a sense of community or let people co-construct their knowledge together.”

Yossarian in your classroom?

While we believe that Yossarian could be particularly useful in education, we’re aware that we need to gather more feedback from teachers actively using our tool in the classroom. So if you’re a teacher, we would love to hear from you! So far we have noted that a PG filter, blocking inappropriate images, is needed. While we work on implementing this feature, please do exercise your own judgement when using Yossarian with children. We do currently filter all results for explicit content, however the occasional non-PG image does appear. We hope that this doesn’t put you off using our creative search engine and that Yossarian can make your lessons fun, engaging, and stimulating!

Can technology like Yossarian, a creative search engine, help with the process of writing a poem? What happens when you use the tool in your day-to-day creative practice? These are questions we wanted to find out when poet Helen Mort took up the challenge to write a poem every day inspired by a search on Yossarian.

Named as one of the Next Generation poets by the Poetry Book Society in 2014, Helen’s first poetry collection Division Street won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and the T.S. Eliot Prize. After completing her PhD on neuroscience and contemporary poetry at Sheffield University, Helen became the Douglas Caster Creative Writing Fellow in the School of English at the University of Leeds. She was also the Derbyshire Poet Laureate between 2013-2015. Helen’s blog exploring the dialogue between neuroscience and poetry, ‘Poetry on the brain’, was listed as one of Picador’s ‘Best Poetry Blogs’ in 2014.

Given Helen’s particular interest in popular neuroscience and the power of metaphor, we were very excited to have her play with Yossarian and see what she made of it as a creative tool. Today marks the end of Helen’s four-day challenge, so we caught up with her to chat about her experience.

“I’ve been really enjoying this week. It has been so nice starting each day with a poem. It’s so unlike what I normally do in the morning. It has made me rethink my writing routine,” says Helen. Using words suggested by followers of her blog, Helen searched Yossarian for various terms including ‘home’, ‘serendipity’, ‘aspirational’, and lastly ‘end’. Helen found that she tended to scroll through the resulting images until one stood out to her, which she then used as stimulus for a poem. “I keep getting a lot of images with people in them but for some reason I don’t pick those. I find that I’m more drawn to ones without people.”

When asked how she normally comes up with ideas for poems, Helen says that it’s quite the opposite process to her experience this week with Yossarian. “I normally wait for a long time until an idea insists to be written. Usually I start with one idea and I’ll often carry it around for a long time before putting pen to paper, waiting for something else to connect with it, something that has an affinity.” Helen found that Yossarian accelerated this process: “Instead of waiting for two things to connect, I’m making a very instantaneous connection. Which is at once probably a bit more superficial but also a lot faster. It’s a different way of working definitely.”

So does that mean the resulting poems are different in quality to what Helen would normally produce? “In some ways they are more surface-deep poems, however I was really pleased  with the poem about the dog Tschingel, as it connects with things I’m interested in anyway. It’s one that I might keep.” Helen found that Yossarian was good for bringing latent ideas to the surface. “Using Yossarian helped me to write something that on the one hand I wouldn’t have ordinarily written, but that also has a link to my other interests and work.”

Noticing how her mood affected the words she chose each day, and how that was then reflected in the mood of the poems, Helen found using Yossarian to be much like keeping a diary. “It’s like having a daily diary where I have been responding to words. It’s so nice starting the day with the challenge, rather than checking my emails. It’s something that I think that lots of people could benefit from, not only writers.”

The challenge also gave Helen the opportunity to consider images more deeply than she otherwise might. “We’re bombarded by images on the internet, and can become a bit numb to them, or even start to feel quite negative towards them. It’s good to look at the images on Yossarian and spend time with them. It’s a really good exercise to actually look at something and know you have to respond to it and think about it in a bit more detail than you would normally.” Instead of feeling overwhelmed by too much information, like on other search engines, Helen found the experience of Yossarian to be quite calming and ideal for stimulating ideas.

Helen said that she felt happy sharing her ideas on Yossarian, but that the most exposing thing about the challenge was sharing her poem drafts on her blog immediately after writing them. “I’ve had other writers contact me and say they have found it really reassuring and inspiring that I’m willing to share these drafts on my blog. Normally I spend a long time with a poem before I let other people see it. Maybe using Yossarian has encouraged me to be a bit less precious about that. At least for this challenge anyway!”

Yossarian works on the juxtaposition of ideas. There is power in metaphor, in putting one idea against another and seeing something new come to life. This is something that Helen is keenly aware of having researched the parallels between neuroscience and poetry for her PhD. She was interested in how the more we find out about the brain, the more we become aware of its mysteries. “It struck me that this is very similar to what poets do in their work. They’re seeking things out but also aligned to the possibility of mystery.” By making connections between themes in contemporary poetry and popular neuroscience, Helen sought to compare two disciplines which appear to not have much in common but which benefit from being set against each other. “This is something that I think is probably true of almost everything in the world. Any two things can benefit from a dialogue. Interest lies in difference and in unusual connections rather than the obvious. I think this is what Yossarian is all about,” says Helen.

We’re really pleased to hear how much Helen enjoyed the challenge this week and that she intends to continue to use Yossarian as a creative tool for brainstorming, as well as to find interesting images to use on her blog. Many thanks to Helen for taking up the challenge and for the great interview! Find out more about Helen’s experience on her blog, and check out the resulting poems:day one, day two, day three, and day four.

This week we’re thrilled to have Helen Mort, award-winning poet and author of the blog “Poetry on the brain”, taking up the challenge to use Yossarian to inspire poetry. Over four days Helen will write a daily poem based on ideas she has generated using Yossarian.

With a PhD on metaphor, neuroscience, and contemporary poetry, Helen is in an extraordinary position to provide insight into how Yossarian, an idea engine that works by generating metaphors, might impact on the creative process. Helen will explore if our technology can help her write new poems and whether there can be a dialogue between a search engine and a piece of creative writing. Read more about the challenge on Helen’s blog.

We’ll be posting an interview with Helen about her experience once the challenge is complete.

Here is Helen’s first poem on day one, inspired by this image found on Yossarian.

Home

Home is a blank square

inside a solid, wooden frame.

A canvas, white as magnolia,

pale as your fear and square

like an envelope, missing

an address. You stare into it

every day, invent the scene:

arrange three dining chairs,

put down a single, patterned rug.

You could make your home

anywhere. You could hold

the frame out, take imaginary

photographs. You could peer

straight through it, into it,

pretending its a mirror, pretending

you like what you see.

We’re excited to have been invited to speak at the HCID Open Day 2015: Design at Work, taking place next week at the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design in London. J. Paul Neeley, co-founder of Yossarian, will talk about how search engines today pose a dilemma: on the one hand they are incredibly powerful tools when we know what we are looking for, but when we don’t know what we’re seeking, in moments where real creativity is needed, traditional search engines can be extremely limiting. They become self referential echo chambers, reinforcing existing and popular ideas and doing very little to support truly new concepts. In this talk J. Paul will explore new approaches to search which offer lateral and metaphorical results, thus facilitating creativity and discovery on the web.

The HCID Open Day is a free mini conference where invited guest speakers from industry and academia gather to talk about innovation and creativity in UX, HCI, interaction design and other related fields. This year’s theme is ‘Design at Work’ with talks around best practice within design professions, designing products aimed at business environments, and advice on how researchers and designers can cooperate.

Whether you’re a poet, a novelist, or a blogger, as a writer you constantly need to come up with ideas. From finding an interesting way to express a particular feeling to devising blog post topics, great ideas are where great writing starts. There are some brilliant tips out there for overcoming writer’s block, but we think that Yossarian, an augmented-creativity tool, could just be one of the most powerful creative writing tools available today.

Yossarian is a visual idea generator that works by showing you images that are metaphorically associated to your search term. It primes you for creative thinking and helps you have more eureka moments. Working Yossarian into your daily writing practice will improve your ability to come up with ideas, and it’s perfect as a stimulus for free writing exercises. It’s also useful if you know that you want to write about a certain topic, anger for example, but you’re not sure how to approach it.

Follow these three steps to spark ideas and boost your creative writing with Yossarian:

1 - Enter a concept you want to explore and set the conceptual distance slider (from literal to serendipitous). The slider lets you set how near or distant you want your results to be from your search term. In other words, If you want to see images that are direct representations of your idea, set the slider to 1. If you want to explore laterally associated content, set the slider somewhere in the middle (recommended). If you want to see results that will really make you think about your topic in a new way set the slider to the maximum distance for serendipitous results!

2 - Explore metaphorically related images showing you fresh perspectives on your idea. Hopefully an image will stand out and make you think about your topic in a new way. When this happens you can immediately record your flash of inspiration on an idea card. It’s easy to create one - just press the heart on the image and write down your thoughts on the idea card that pops up.

3 - Take the metaphor that you have just created and work it into your writing. The metaphor might open up whole new approaches to your topic, or it might be a powerful way to express something you had been struggling to find the words for. Either way, metaphor can be extremely effective at communicating complex ideas in few words.

"As a poet, it's really important for me to be economical with words. That's where metaphors come in handy. I find Yossarian really useful for creating metaphors and helping me to think about what I want my poem to say." - Sarah, poet.

Struggling to think of a great name for your new business or product? Did you know that Google in its first incarnation was dubbed BackRub, that Pepsi was known as Brad’s Drink, and that Yahoo was known as Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web? Even the biggest brands find it tough to settle on a name that fits, but it’s worth persevering as your name is one of the most powerful branding tools you have. 

"Some words have characteristics that fire the imagination and generate interest... Don't underestimate the power of a brand name to achieve things on its own for you" - David Placek, founder of brand-name consulting firm Lexicon. 

This post will show you how to find the perfect name with a little help from Yossarian.

Brainstorming is the first step to finding a name that captures your brand.

 Follow these four steps to find name inspiration with Yossarian, the visual idea engine: 1 - Enter a word that represents your product, such as "comfort". 2 - Browse images that are metaphorically related to your search term and think about how they connect with your brand. What stories do they tell? 3 - Find an image that resonates and save your flash of inspiration on an idea card. 4 - Use your idea cards to inspire names that will instantly and deeply connect your customers with your business.

“I had spent ages thinking about a possible name for my knitting business, and I was going around in circles. Using Yossarian let me see my service in a new and unexpected light. It made me think about how I want my customers to feel, and directly led me to a name that communicates everything I’m about” - Betty Smith, textile designer.

Try it out for yourself now!

Several times as we have shared yossarian with professional creatives we have a moment when suddenly they go ghost white as they realize exactly what we are trying to do. The conversations usually go something like this.

Creative: "Wait, wait, wait. So what you are really doing is teaching computers to do the one thing that I thought computers aren't supposed to be able to do. You're teaching computers to be creative!" Us: "Yep." Creative: "Ha! Well there goes my job!"

There has been a lot written about the future implications of artificial intelligence, from robots and computers displacing human workers, to work "below the API" – even the existential threat posed to humanity. We have seen astonishing progress in areas such as computer vision and language understanding and translation. From self-driving Google cars to Watson’s Jeopardy domination to personal assistants such as VIv, computers are becoming increasingly intelligent and sophisticated in tasks that were for many years considered human domains.

It is clear that soon no part of our lives will be left untouched by these kinds of changes. And when we think about advertising and marketing in particular, this is absolutely the case. It is now easy to see how planning, research, insight and buying activities will be eaten by software, but it is even true of very human advertising domains, such as creativity. That’s right. In the near future, some of the best creatives in an agency will be computers! (Think Robot Don Draper credited with winning one of your next Cannes Lions.)

For the past year, we have been working on a powerful creative tool called Yossarian that "augments" your creativity through lateral association. The system is based on our metaphorical search engine and creative graph.  We take the concept you are searching, and then return results from other domains that have a similar conceptual association. We are looking for lateral association, or metaphors. Interestingly, your ability to see lateral connections is limited to your own experience, and too often the creative process is completely dependent on serendipity for the big idea or insight. Yossarian assists in these moments by getting you to a more diverse set of ideas, faster. And because Yossarian accesses more information about the world than one individual can ever hope to, it can suggest directions that may not otherwise have been considered.

Yossarian is optimized for fresh, curious, questionable and even crazy linkages. It is in stark contrast to the experience of using Google search to inspire creativity, where hours can be wasted going through the cliche and trying to trick the system into giving you something interesting. Instead of regurgitating what the world already knows about a topic (in some ways what a traditional search engine does), Yossarian works to suggest new ways of looking at things.

We have enjoyed promising early results, with top art directors, copywriters, planners, and strategists in London, NYC, Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Stockholm, Sao Paulo, Oslo, Berlin, SF, LA, and Sydney all using the tool in their daily work (Often without admitting it! Its their secret creative weapon! ). We have received seed funding from SAATCHiNVEST, part of M&C Saatchi, to further develop the product, and we even know of one major campaign in the UK this past year that had its initial direction inspired by Yossarian.

“Some day on your next Cannes Lion you’re going to credit an artificial intelligence for coming up with ideas” - J. Paul Neeley.

Last week we were delighted to participate in an engaging panel at Ad Week, titled “Augmented Creativity: Man vs. Machine”. Writer Damian Barr was a brilliant panel host, and we enjoyed debating the possibilities and implications of artificial intelligence with Lee Ramsay, Head of Innovation at Initiative UK, poet Helen Mort, and design historian Juliette Kristensen. 

Some really interesting insights came out of the discussion, especially concerning how technology, rather than simply “taking over” human jobs, allows us to change what we spend our time on. When augmented creativity technology like Yossarian is added to our toolkit, it allows us to get to novel ideas faster and focus our attention on manifesting these ideas in the world. 

We’re excited to be participating in a panel at Ad Week on Monday 23rd March. 

In a discussion titled "Augmented Creativity: Man vs. Machine", we’ll explore the impact that technology like Yossarian is having on the creative industries. Hosted by novelist Damian Barr, we’ll be joined on the panel by Lee Ramsay, Head of Innovation at Initiative UK, Poet Helen Mort, and Design Historian Juliette Kristensen. It promises to be a really interesting session! If you can’t be there in person, catch the live stream here.

Lee Ramsey suggests that technology like Yossarian creates a dilemma between embracing beneficial technologies and being cautious of the “existential threat” they pose when they challenge our notions of processes previously believed to be solely in the human domain, such as creativity. What we believe at Yossarian Lives is that the augmented creativity revolution is coming, and it’s not something to fear!

At Yossarian Lives we know how useful metaphors can be for exploring concepts and sparking ideas. But now there’s evidence to suggest that using metaphors can also increase levels of empathy between people, and lead to a heightened ability to read emotions in a face.

Researchers at the University of Western Ontario showed participants photos of eyes displaying different emotions which then had to be identified. Some participants had been exposed to a conversation containing metaphors beforehand while others hadn’t. Those who had were better able to identify emotions. The researches explained their results by reasoning that comprehension of metaphors relies “on an extra-linguistic context consisting of past memories, thoughts, and emotions more than when they read literal text”. They suggest that this “additional processing primes people to ‘simulate’ other people’s emotions later on when they inspect the test faces.”

Hi Everyone! From coverage in Fast Company, The New York Times, BigThink, being part of the German Wired launch, and a mention in Forbes, to our first 1 million image month in September, it has been an exciting year, and we can't thank you enough for being a part of it.   We've seen 1000s of ideas generated and shared, and heard about Yossarian being used to inspire ideas, assist brainstorming, find the perfect image for a slide presentation, support creativity for creative professionals, open up classroom discussions for students, and even write poetry. It is still very early days, but the panda is evolving and growing, getting faster and smarter, and we can't wait to see how you'll use this creative powerful tool in the coming year. We're also excited to announce that we've closed seed investment from an impressive and talented group of London based investors, whose other investments include CityMapper & Evrythng. These funds match our award from the Technology Strategy Board (now Innovate UK) and are allowing us to further develop the product in some exciting ways. A big thank you for all the support this year. All of you who have used and explored the site and shared your ideas and feedback have been instrumental in this growth and we hope you'll continue to play with Yossarian as the panda continues to improve. This is just the start and we can't wait for you to see what's coming next. Have a wonderful holiday season, and best wishes from everyone here! Sincerely, Dan, J. Paul & the Yossarian Team